The New Bilinguals - Our Paper Prototype

1.Quick Recap

Our question: How can we cure bilingual patients with expressive aphasia?

Final Solution: We are shifting towards creating an educational application that will allow users to relearn the language without having to regularly go visit a physician/therapist.

The educational application at this point will focus on Romance languages, which are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Therefore, the current application focuses on patients who are bilingual in these languages, which, given the multilingualism especially in Europe, will still allow us to target a large number of patients.

2.Description of our Application

Step 1. Phonology

Since the Romance languages share a lot of their phonology, here the patient will not choose the language they are bilingual in, but rather practice outputting the sounds they see on the screen.

On the screen, combinations of letters (eg. Ph, Rr) will come up, the app will say the sound out loud, and the patient will repeat after the app.

Step 2. Saying the words out loud

In this next step, the patient will choose their first and second language.

The screen will show a picture of something, and the patient is required to say the words for the picture in the two languages they have chosen.

(eg. Question 1-A: The app will respond to the sound “perro” (Spanish), 1-B: Same picture, the app will next respond to the sound “chien” (French)).

Since expressive aphasia patients do not have trouble understanding or knowing what they want to say, this is to get the patients to practice actually saying the words out loud.

After completing words with fewer syllables, the app will move on to longer and more complicated words. Since the number of syllables in a word may not be mutual among the two languages, the app will base its word selection based on whichever language the patient has chosen as their first language.

Step 3. Spelling the words out

Here, most of the flow will be the same as step two, but instead of saying the words out loud in two languages, the patients are now required to type the words in the two languages.

To not stress out the patients too much, the app will have boxes that show how many letters the word has (eg. Under the picture of a dog, there will be 5 boxes for Spanish/French). Again, based on the number of letters in the patient’s first language, the words will get longer as the program moves on.